transgender studies quarterly has a kickstarter so that they can start their journal

I really like the idea of TSQ, especially as a person who has thought about submitting there at some point. I have a lot of feelings about the Kickstarter campaign though, some of which aren’t really related to the intentions/consequences of the campaign itself.

1. I really wish I knew more about how academic journals are founded, and what options exist for creating one that is naming a field. TSQ will be put out by Duke University Press, who also does GLQ. Do journals normally have to front something like $20,000 to the publisher to get started? Where does that money usually come from? Do academic departments sponsor that kind of cash? What does it mean for an academic journal to become profitable? Would trans* studies as a field have to become more “profitable” for the journal to remain viable?
2. How much does it suck that trans* people always have to front money that is generally paid by institutions to do stuff that they need? (journals, health care, surgeries, legal changes, etc.)
3. I’ve seen several critiques of TSQ not coming out as an online, open-source journal. I share that feeling, hesitantly. I get why having a print journal—hosted by Duke no less—is important for establishing a field, which is more of what this Kickstarter seems to be about than funding the journal. Does that mean I would be investing in a field I could potentially publish in? That feels good but also feels fucked. I also know that magazines like Original Plumbing (w/e) held similar fundraising campaigns but still produce print copies that are sold. I wonder about the assumption that all content hosted online should be free. I like the idea of TSQ being a book-length journal you can buy at a bookstore. I wish academic journals more broadly weren’t connected almost solely to institutional access. Ugh too many feelings.
4. Asking for donations that would end up with the founders/editors coming for a campus visit is really smart and actually a huge effort on the part of the editors. I mean, Dean Spade came to UW and he’s everybody’s trans* studies darling and painted as a totally awesome person and I am 98% sure he charged more than $1500 for the visit. He does different things with that money (I think he gives it to SRLP) than some campus visit people. But campus visits are cheap and are sometimes how contingent faculty make ends meet (not that Paisley Currah or Susan Stryker are contingent faculty).

Ok back to grading everything ever.

steps to a conference panel

• tell professor three things about current trans research:a) too much participant research that relies on hero/tragedy narratives (aka risk/resilience in health sciences, success/lack of success in rhetorical spaces in comp/rhet), b) too much discourse analysis that relies on trans autobiographies (99% suck?), and c) weird “thought experiments” about “transgender discourse” that are described as “pretending to write like the other gender” (I shit you not)
• tell professor it might be cool to blend participant research (interviews) with participant-oriented discourse analysis (the interviewee picks the tumblr posts/youtube videos/etc that get analyzed and read all the conclusions the researcher does) to move away from these previously discussed methods
• professor tells me to read as part of my research an autobiography written by a trans woman in comp/rhet who is a self-identified “Christian libertarian,” then mispronouns her 

WAT

when i visited my grandparents, my uncle had us go to church because he was leading singing. before the service my grandmother complained about the wednesday night ladies’ bible class because it was taking them months to get through their book and she wanted to join the older couples group with my grandfather.

we went to the wednesday ladies’ bible class (my grandmother, my mother, and me) which felt incredibly weird gender-wise obviously but also really familiar.  it was very odd to be in that space because if you are church of christ and quit going to church before you’re an adult, you never go to the adult classes.  the ladies’ classes are the only classes where a woman can lead prayer.  so you only get to see that happen if you are an adult woman or read as an adult woman.

as such, the praying was extra intimate; i don’t know if this is typical of ladies’ bible classes, but it turned into a lot of intimate description of what was going on with people’s bodies. different women knew people and family members who needed kidneys or had just gotten diagnosed with breast cancer or had incurable rashes or were having heart trouble. there were a few “pray for sandy because she’s having a hard time walking a righteous path” requests which made me think of when i was in high school and my mom would come home from wednesday night ladies’ bible class with a handwritten prayer list of names with mine at the bottom.

then the leader walked us through group close reading a chapter of exodus (the one where they get manna).  it did take forever.

Two weeks ago I wrote a bulleted list about people doing research and writing about Tumblr. A week later I had an intense conversation with my adviser (all of our conversations are intense) about doing post-internet research. I’m mulling all this over and thinking about what it means, and all I’ve landed on is lol no one should ever use someone else’s Tumblr for an academic purpose without their explicit consent.

That might seem like an easy conclusion, but I’ve seen it happen over and over—particularly in the past year, and particularly around specific Tumblr users’ blogging about trauma. What’s hard about this particular question of methods is that it’s unclear to me and to many other people whether or not a Tumblr is a human subject. I don’t mean that only in a OOO way—institutional review boards have a hard time coming down on this; they’re often unclear if things like Tumblr and Facebook are truly “public” and if you should get the consent of the user before using their Tumblr even if you plan on citing it.  No one can decide if Tumblrs are “just text” or extensions of the people who create them (though to me I feel like that’s pretty obvious).

Part of what is interesting about Tumblr is the inside-outsideness of how community building works here. So yeah there is this public page, but then there is a private web of connections on the back end, one that seems much more important to me; the only way that I interact with people on Tumblr is if they are tapped in as well, since I don’t do Disqus for blog commenting functions and I don’t keep track of stats externally. It makes me think about how when you go to an archive, there are often sealed boxes that can’t be accessed until 50 years after the death of the person; usually these boxes are full of letters and diaries and other life documentation. What if we treated Tumblrs like sealed archives? Ostensibly anyone can access a person’s Tumblr, but that doesn’t mean we have to treat them like they are public.

i love c/r as a field but i hate how everyone in it is so together.  i feel like i am constantly gulping down mental health issues because none of my grad student peers seem comfortable with hearing about them. i essentially came out to my class in a discussion question on monday night (thinking about mental health, this idea of “chemical imbalance,” the brain as a thing, and also psych drugs in relation to OOO) and i wonder if it will get subsumed by other discussions like all my other discussion questions about gender, race, bodies, transness, queer things, etc.  part of the problem with breadth of c/r and maybe part of the problem with OOO is how talking about so many things means we usually talk about the same TAB white middle-class male things.

maybe it’s just the current batch of people.  but even folks who i see with patterns of mental health stuff put their best face forward and plow through in a way i can never see myself doing.  maybe this is about grad school in general and not c/r.  though i wonder if disciplines with particularly gendered/service (course) based histories like c/r or library science require this weird “button yourself up and keep on trucking” mentality for the sake of the way we think of work in raced, gendered, and classed ways.

mad at school just won the cccc outstanding book award, which is awesome, i guess.  i’m going to read it for an assignment this semester. long story short everything sucks and i want to go back to bed forever.

thoughts on first-year composition:

• should be primarily a space for experimentation—>why isn’t english 100 taught like a chemistry lab?*
• should not be approached with the attitude that we are “teaching” writing—students already know how to write, they need practice with specific rhetorical forms more than anything else—>jesus christ, let go of the banking model of education
• should prepare students for writing in their intended field—give them a chance to work out what writing in their field could be like
• should also give them a sense of what prejudiced lit studies people will do when their papers get graded in a lit class
• should be in touch with new media, a sense of place, the embodiment of writing, how writing is changing as the internet becomes a huge force in communication, etc.

___

*yeah, i know chemistry labs aren’t actually about experimentation

crossing the river

i’m worried about what writing fixes in time, what it means to write about the unresolved past and future, what to do with the unsayable.

i saw eli clare this week, and in a group over lunch where i fear i took up a lot of discussion space, he talked about writing and its relationship to growing up in a rural town—how there’s no way to anonymize people or places, how your work will never even end up there.  writing after being rural relies on a lack of access to hide where you are now, relies on knowing that changing means above all else leaving people you love behind—as clare put it, seeing those you love spread out in a comet trail behind you.

i think about this tumblr a lot, how it opened up so many relationships for me, how i met many people in my life who i love hard through it.  certainly as many people as i love in madison.  but the opening up i do here about my family and my life is predicated on the idea that my family and their peers will never read it.

i am banking on a basic privilege here: internet access.  my parents have never had consistent, speedy internet services. broadband doesn’t cross the bridge that leads to our house.  satellite internet is spotty and too expensive.  i rely on that lack of access to interact with my networks on tumblr and elsewhere on the internet.  but i can’t help but know how fucked up that is.

when i was a first year in college, i changed my myspace page to say i was a lesbian in “dickhater, ga.”*  in november, my mom called me and confronted me about it.  a woman at our church whose daughter was also queer had been researching her friends on her new internet connection, because her daughter had forgotten to log out of myspace before she went back to college.  the fellow church member had saw that her daughter listed herself as a lesbian and that we were friends.

my mother, however, saw this reification of my lesbian identity as a rejection of my home rhetorical space that thrives on the open secret and a symptom of my newly constant internet access.  after all, she had cancelled our dialup after she initially learned i had a myspace account.  “i didn’t send you away to college so that you could become a lesbian,” she said coldly.  “you can’t put things like that up on the internet for everyone to see.”  there was a southern rural understanding of privacy incongruent with having a myspace page, much less one that says you’re lesbian.  i was angrily hunched outside of walters, kicking the thick magnolia leaves that crowded the pathway like they did my uncle’s driveway.  i don’t remember how i responded to my mother.  i wrote a blog post about it on my myspace but i deleted my myspace profile in 2008.

at lunch this wednesday, eli clare told us about how his mother, a community college composition teacher, begged to read his work (his senior thesis?  his mfa collection?  i’m not sure) over and over.  he told her she wouldn’t like it, that it was about his remembrance of their shared past.  she scolded him and asked to read it anyway, and he sent it to her.  she never responded to his work or asked to read anything else.

i feel like this is why i share so little with my parents but write so much and thus reveal so much about who i am and where i come from.  if i ever told my mother how i experienced growing up in our home, i imagine her response would be the same as eli’s mother’s—silence.  the few ventures i’ve made in that regard have ended that way already.  what would it mean to piece together what i remember of ex-gay therapy and confront her with that?  my father has such a revisionist history of who i am that i doubt my narrative would even remotely match his.  the one time he recalled a common memory we shared—me being pelted with insults in the car rider line my last day of my first year of high school as i kissed my girlfriend for what would be the last time before i clambered into the passenger seat of his pick up truck—he claimed that i was intentionally trying to shame our family and sully his parenting by daring to be queer in public.  he used this memory as evidence that my transness was about my incorrigible desire to challenge his parental authority.

i don’t know what ot do with this disconnect brought about by both material access and distorted memory.  i just don’t know. and i feel like writing about memories like the one i just did freeze them and my parents in time, present them to a simultaneously limited and infinite audience without the chance for them to respond.  something just feels fucked about that, even if their own memories and actions are equally fucked.

eli clare talked extensively about getting an mfa rather than a phd of some sort.  i wonder if the same reasons, the same circumstances, and many of the same questions and problems of access are why i did the opposite.  i wonder why i chose to go into a path where writing about queerness isn’t writing about my life experience as such—was it an unwillingness to open myself up to my own family, to hold them accountable and also have them hold me accountable for the choices we all made?  i wonder if i will ask myself these questions for the rest of my life.

_____

*oh, lord.

what i’ve learned from teaching high school students so far, pt. 2

• a lot of folks HATE teenagers because they operate in this slightly unfamiliar culture that tries to occlude itself from adult view.  but i love it; i love it when they talk back to me, i love it when they challenge my authority or talk about something i don’t know, or make fun of me for being old (???), because i never took it as a real threat from the get go and now it’s more of a game.
• that feels good, because i do want them to learn to question authority and question rhetorical patterns of domination that are often set up in education situations, even in programs like the one i’m working for that have the best of intentions
• “kids these days” are going to fucking shift everything about this world.  when i was in high school, my peers were incredibly homophobic and this played out two ways:  as silence, and as outright dismissal of queer ways of being.  just ten years later i have a group of kids where straight dudes (at least for now) feel comfortable challenging the heterosexism and gender bullshit of our curriculum.
• most of them love frank ocean and justin bieber at the same time.  they also still like fart jokes.

so my act prep workbooks for my sophomores are pretty awful.  today we were working on inferences, and one of the exercises asked you to make an inference about the following paragraph:

The young man picked up the phone.  He looked at a phone number written in pink ink on a slip of paper.  He dialed the first five numbers and then hung up.  He bit his nails.  He picked up the phone again.

after they inferred that he was nervous about calling someone he had a crush on, i asked them who they thought the object of his affection was.  one girl said, “i guess a girl, since it’s written in pink ink.”

but then one of my beloved troublemakers, a guy who loves skateboarding, piped up and said, “wait, a guy can like pink ink, too!”  and a bunch of other folks agreed with him.

and then i got really choked up and explained that i’m glad they brought that up, because men can like pink ink and boys can get nervous about calling guys, and though that was the answer in my teacher’s edition it wasn’t necessarily the right one.

then the first girl said, “man, he must have fingernails that are too long.”

eta: i was so worried to teach a group of high school students, especially remembering how my high school peers tormented our gay math teacher.  but they have never said anything about it, and they are all so nice to me that i don’t even really get it.

i bought into the linear narrative of transition for some reason, and i’m finding that it’s so wrong for me (not necessarily for others); i’m starting to understand it in myself, rather than just seeing it in other people; starting to understand that it’s ok to have lots of layers of identity, to have my parents and grandparents see me as their (grand)daughter, however complicated that is. to have my roommate say she thinks i’m extra femme (“the gayest gay person i know”) because i like martha stewart, lace, and knitting and feel weird about it because domestic skills are so tied up in my home identity, my girl past.

i tell myself it’s ok to want to go by he/him pronouns but not being bothered by the shes and theys. or to even want that sometimes. and that reciprocally, it’s important for me to neither read people as trans or cis when i first meet them, to discreetly figure out how to pronoun them, rather than assuming one way or the other.

i don’t know what it all means for me, or really for everyone, but i’m becoming more ok with it all.

What Not To Wear: Academic Edition

lazz:

quote via hautepop

“Academic dress” (as defined by these bloggers) done right should be straight down the line COS, aka mid-budget Marni with fewer prints. Suitably librarian-ish and sexless, but also chic as fuck.

But that is not the point - the point and the problem is that women in academia are apparently supposed to evidence no sexuality and bodily awareness in how they dress. By this I don’t mean anything so obvious as cleavage - I mean shape, cut, a just-so attitude. Apparently women in academia are supposed to be dis-embodied, such that (as the original blog post demonstrates) they spend hours worrying how to present themselves suitably so. Women in academia appear to believe - perhaps rightly - that men in academia want them to be neutered men.

Driven by a combination of serendipity and desperation, I interned in commercial real estate consultancy in the summer of my third year. It’s an intensely old-school male-dominated environment: a fully 90:10 gender imbalance is typical and women had to be able to hold their own against a certain amount of masculine banter and bullshit.

But I remember being struck by how some of the senior, partner-level women dressed: the shoes, the silk shift dresses, the sharply-cut slightly cropped jackets. It was chic and it was feminine, expressing a strength through a distinct identity rather than conforming to an imitation of men’s suiting. It felt like a game I could play, and maybe do well at.

So I went commercial. No-one had ever said in academia that I wasn’t going to fit. But I read the semiotic codes and the writing was on the shirt label.

i’ve been thinking about this a lot this year, especially coming into a cohort of eleven with nine women, all who are very very different people and have very very different fashion tastes.  only one of us is really invested in “fashion” in a sense, and by that i mean the kinds of incredibly expensive, marni-esque hard femme fashion you see a lot in art history/visual culture/performance studies kinds of ph.d. programs.  and she actually doesn’t wear that kind of stuff frequently because she can’t afford it anymore and she’s actually much more of a marc jacobs person.

for me, dressing for class and conferences this year largely meant toning down my stranger patterns of dress and entering into a button-down shirt and jeans or khakis kind of life, mostly because i was often too tired to really care what i wore, and also because i was trying to not give off as much of a femme vibe as i normally do moving into the first space where i’ve interacted en masse with cisgender men in five years.

i also go to a flagship land-grant university with brutal winters, so dressing up or down is really relative, i suppose.  most of us look fairly scuzzy during the winter months because it’s really hard to rock a down jacket and the thickest sweaters you own (though not impossible).  but year-round there’s a much more down-to-earth, “this is not a metropolitan-area grad school and we don’t expect you to dress that way” kind of vibe (which i love). lazz, it makes me think a lot about when you said “country is a gender…/and so is crust punk/ there’s a 15 minute drive from one to the other.”*

what bugs me, though, is probably a fairly obvious observation.  i feel like the women in my program (and not 100%, obviously—i definitely know a few women who have three skirts that they only wear to conferences and to teach in) are pressured to dress a degree less casually than the men; to present themselves as at least a little more polished than the scruffy guys in my department.  i remember this dynamic being much more intense at my undergrad, where the men frequently wore beat up cardigans or irritatingly racist print kaftans from their anthropological research and the women were almost always dressed to the nines.  it was an unspoken, weird dynamics.  this is especially evident in that some men in my department never dress up to teach, while almost all of the women do.

this isn’t universal.  but i suppose what i’m trying to say is that at even less fashionable rural-ish institutions, there’s still a fairly obvious gendered and classed double standard when it comes to dressing like an academic.

___

*by the way, lazz, this post i’ve linked to has been in my drafts folder since you posted it, but i’ve never cooked up a response to it till now.

bitter thoughts

i feel like this loss was in part about the energy from the recall movement being rolled into the barrett campaign, which to me looks like a lot of white rural Wisconsin people disidentifying with Milwaukee and Madison for a) the very real snideness towards rural people from middle-class white progressive types in urban (and urban-light) areas and b) their own racism.

i grew up in another agrarian state that basically totally disavowed the presence of its biggest, most racially-divided city (memphis vs. the rest of tennessee), so this feels familiar.

walker played this up—he basically claimed with his 7-to-1 campaign ads that barrett would turn the whole state into Milwaukee . that was a great tactic—to play off progressive and liberal snideness through the intense power of racism—especially when milwaukee is the most racially segregated city in the united states.

moon time

summer is such a strange time.  a week has passed since i finished my ma coursework, and i still haven’t gotten over the push it took to get there.  i’ve avoided most outside contact for almost a month and i haven’t been able to ease back into it yet.  i’m trying to see people and trying to finish up two big projects by june 1, so there’s enough going on that i do have to get up and about.

it’s weird, but i feel like my lows come most frequently after my birthday.  it always seems to be the end of the semester, the beginning of summer, some kind of disorienting time switch.  the week after my birthday are generally tough ones, because i usually have bad luck on or around my birthday.  on my fifteenth birthday, i was outed to my parents by my high school principal; around my 22nd birthday, i outed myself to my mom accidentally around the time i was graduating college.

maybe it’s just an emotional pattern, getting used to some kind of massive, usually negative change during late may.  i guess what’s changed this year, for better or for worse, is that i made it through my first year of graduate school.